Page 224 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

204 Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.
material, which is actually our group autobiography, for the last fifty years
in fiction and nonfiction.
Ask Patricia Morrisroe. Be wary of wannabe artistes and stenographic
historiennes who sacrilegiously and pompously invoke our dead whose
history they claim to be “saving” from oblivion.
They actually think they’re arriving in our life as if our life were
abandoned and as if major talents have not kept full record of our life.
Sacre bleu!
I mean it’s nice that foreign graduate students and tenure-hungry
academics want to formulate leather on the head of a Prufrockian pin.
True scholarship is, of course, welcome, even needed; but true scholars
never make the actual “source people” and “source material” disappear so
the scholar can appear to be the source.
That’s theft of intellectual property.
This is not ad hoc or ad hominem. It’s not even an issue. It’s a principle
It’s peculiar that every group has roots except white male faggot
leathermen.
Ask Maya Angelou.
Why shouldn’t this particular leather pop culture history be best told
by the actual “author”-ities, the men who created it for males, lived it as
males, and recorded it, not as separatists but as humanists. The sexual lib-
eration fronts included everybody; gay men were just more immediately
intense about succeeding.
All the male witness-authors, witness-photographers, and witness-
artists who have been vastly creative and widely published for this last half
a century have long done quite well mapping our leatherman’s history.
And, frankly, these deeply established writers don’t appreciate the lesbigay
bandito scholarship that literally steals facts, dates, names, vocabulary,
and concepts from intellectual property that certain wannabe scholars
then fail to acknowledge by so much as a footnote. (I am naming them in
my will.)
Ask those semi-plagiarists who know who they are. You can always
spot the usual suspects. They arrived post-1980 on the leather scene; they
became first noticeably active at exactly the same time as AIDS; they write
the trendspeak of political correctness; and they endlessly use the cliched
rhetoric of queer studies — a language invented by academics who must
publish or perish.
Despite such faux prophets in our midst, do seek your spirituality,
mystical experiences, and transcendence, but not in gay magazines and
leather literature — much of it written under the fundamentalist thumb of
cultish egos and media money — published by straight males and edited
by women for gay men. (Read the mastheads on magazines.)

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 05-05-2017
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